The Foot of Compassion and Complicity

Abstract

Sym-pathy or com-passion means sharing pain or trouble. Foot and shoe are often employed to denote sympathy as in “If I were in your shoes.” Foot and shoe, albeit less often, can also be a means to represent complicity, which means folding clothes together. People sometimes have to avoid bad memory or situations and want a closer and more personal bond with like-minded people, so that they together forge fictional scenarios that account for hard situations to them. The main objective of this essay is to explore aspects of the liaison between shoe-foot and compassion-complicity in various cultural and textual sources. 1) The pure sympathy or firm ties and its opposite cases are rather simply represented by one’s putting on the same shoes and taking them off respectively. 2) A shaky and unstable bond is indicated by the abnormal or weak foot which impedes walking itself. The self-exiled 20th Irish modernists, Joyce and Beckett, invent walking obstructions such as flat-foot and disabled feet in the depiction of their ambivalent attitude toward the fatherland. 3) Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons can be said to present certain cases of the complicitous relationship. Mentally stricken, Plath had maintained an imaginary life in the dead father’s boots for 30 years, and, when that relationship was not needed any more, decided to quit her life for good. In Creech’s novel, the two young female classmates whose mothers have equally vanished from home join the complicity which makes them take their situations for a conspiracy-induced one. Only when they wear others’ “moccasins to walk two moons,” their understanding of others can be turned from the narrow and self-serving one to a truly sympathetic one.